Justin Price

What in the hell would you search for anyway???

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Etymology: Latin jocus; perhaps akin to Old High German gehan to say, Sanskrit yācati he asks

Date: 1670

1 a: something said or done to provoke laughter; especially: a brief oral narrative with a climactic humorous twist b (1): the humorous or ridiculous element in something (2): an instance of jesting : kidding, practical joke, laughingstock, something not to be taken seriously : a trifling matter —often used in negative constructions

-As an artist my ideas do not stem from my conscious mind, I'm not one to make statements, but rather my art comes from my subconscious mind. I make because... I don't yet know. One of my theories is that I want to fly, I always have and I always will. And so I combine the light and the heavy; I take heavy things, harshness and seriousness, and attempt to make them light, funny and joyful. I combine cartoons and humor with industry and machinery.

- "Closed systems" was a initially a term I first heard from a professor at MICA in regards to my work. On the surface it was a negative comment but it took and and investigated it as if there was something to learn from these systems. Thus they are physical manifestations of the abstract concept of work being unapproachable or alienating.

-The other half of my "Closed Systems" has to do with Duchamp. What I've always loved about Duchamp is his gestures. They are so simple and yet so powerful. However, what I've always hated about Duchamp is the very thing he was famous for, his ready-mades. To me he is the inventor of "Bull Shit art" where craftsmanship was no longer defined as the mastery of a material but the rather the conceptualization of a piece and while I believe concept is important artists are at their core are creators not philosophers. And so I work with clay so that I may produce the same gestures but without the ready-mades, and instead with raw earth the most basic of elements.

-Failure comes up so often in everyday life; people fail all the time and most, if not all, of the time it is scoured and hated. Failure in society is seen as the ultimate in falling short, the supreme negative. Its actually hard to descried in the world without using the word failure. When a failure occurs it can be crushing and defeating. As a young athlete I was taught at an early age to despise failure and avoid it. The funny thing is that no matter how hard you try failure is unavoidable. In a way it is like death, no one wants to acknowledge it but in reality it is inevitable, for everyone. Sex also shares a similar fate in that it is considered not right or frowned upon by an overall society, thus forcing people to discover it and handle it themselves. Death, sex and failure are the three big DON'Ts in our world, however in reality they are forces that are impossible to avoid. The end result is a majority of people unable to deal with death, sex and failure. As a result it is my intention to bring light to failure and question the validity of its existence. Several times as a high school wrestler my opponents were individuals who, for lack of a better term, kicked ass at wrestling. They'd been wrestling since birth and as a high school junior had more muscles than Sven Carlson, and they were my opponents. Needless to say they destroyed me. I knew I was going to fail and yet when I did I still was affected by it, I still felt disillusioned by it. Why is this? Its because failure is taught to be failure, expected or unexpected, avoidable or inevitable, failure is failure. So my mechanism for accepting this failure became my ability to laugh at it, and I encourage others to laugh at their failures because once we find humor in it we can get over it and hopefully learn from it.

There is also a sadistic side to me, as well as many other people, where we find the failure of others to be humorous. It is that humor that attracts me and connects to the other elements in my work. The more absurd the failure is the more humorous it is. Failure can often look painful, physically or otherwise, but as a 3rd party we often laugh. I call this the "haha, ooooo" effect.

-A piece about fixing an object in absurd ways, in ways that are futile or fruitless. Sometimes hopelessness is funny when you see it from a third perspective. This is a reminder to step back from our stress, our frustration, from the pressures of life and see how silly we really are.

-These pieces for me were an investigation into craft and the absurd object, the tool without a function, the material without purpose. On the post-it notes I wrote glaze and clay body respites that both went into the testing for and final piece. In a coded way the object is basically trying to say what it is, which is why it was so important for me to get the craft correct. It is extremely ironic for an object to put on an elaborate disguise then tell what it really is anyway. It's like Batman going to great lengths to shield his identity but them never wearing a mask.